The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, by Konrad Witz, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at propane in air conditioners, Anduril making submarine parts, nuclear reactors on the moon, the robotic hand landscape (handscape?), and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing Someone created a city building game wher...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Password-protected comic books Password-protected CBZ / CBR files can be opened ( #95 ). The password dialog has a Show password checkbox. Tips on the home page The home page shows a random tip with clickable links and keyboard shortcuts. Click the tip to see another one. Turn tips off with the ShowTips setting ( #5515 ). Manga mode and outline for all formats Toggle Manga Mode work...

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot. On paper , the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023 . There was a time I'd look...

By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem that biology was almost solved. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explained how organisms change and adapt. The modern science of genetics showed how it works at the molecular scale. Genes governing the traits of organisms get passed down from parent to offspring, and random mutations create the variations from which… Source By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem that biology was almost solved...

The first post in this series introduced Frml , a little procedural language I created so that I could learn how program verification works. The second explained how Frml checks simple scalar code; this one explains how it checks programs with multiple functions. As a reminder, the scalar prover owns the engine and leaves two hooks for higher levels: def verify_function ( self , fn ): state = State () for p in fn . params : state . vars [ p . name ] =...

$150 million agreement modification supports Defense Exportability Features and is matched by $150 million in Shield AI capital     WASHINGTON (October 8, 2026) — Shield AI today announced that the U.S. Navy has executed a $150 million modification to its existing Other Transaction (OT) agreement with the company to advance X-BAT, an AI-piloted, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter aircraft.     The Navy executed the $150 million modification with funding from the Office of...

Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] . In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of \pi by throwing darts. Estimating pi ...

More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code . With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP support via Codemode which in some ways is a long time coming, but then also maybe somewhat surprising to some. So I want to share some updated thoughts on this blog on what this all means. What Are Tools Wh...

Sony counted about 94,900 employees on March 31, 2026, against 112,300 a year earlier. This guide to Sony employee statistics breaks that change down by segment, region and subsidiary using Sony’s own filings, and tracks the PlayStation and Bungie cuts announced since 2024. Sony Employee Statistics 94,900 Sony Group employees on March 31, 2026 17,400 Fewer employees than on March 31, 2025 103,600 Average headcount across fiscal 2025, quarter-end basis 52,600 Employees based outsi...

When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it. For instance, if you’re arguing with somebody about microservices 1 , you could say “well, you only like microservices because you want to polish your resume”, or ...

First fire of the year and Sid is loving it. Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bumbling out of the chimney though. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . First fire of the year and Sid is loving it. Not sure we appreciated the giant queen wasp that came bu...

I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner. Codex voice mode I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this, in the Codex tab, using the voice conversation mode, running against a local development environment. Here's what that looks like: ...

The first time I used a coding agent, I was mesmerized . Before the agent, I was copy/pasting between my IDE and an AI chat interface. It was amazing to see an agent edit files directly and fix its own errors in real time. After a few days, the honeymoon wore off as I encountered frequent bugs. The agent would stop responding entirely until I restarted it. Development workflows felt stiflingly primitive, and the agent would often declare tasks finished when work had barely begun. This was i...

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer. The Case of Software Some years ago, when it became clear that AI would solve software engineering, my thinking was: In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe...

I wrote the post below last week. That was a quaint and quiet time. Last night OpenAI released a treasure trove of 722 manuscripts solving 372 major open problems in mathematics including from theoretical computer science: A proof of the unique games conjecture  (formalized in Lean) A full derandomization of randomized log space Matrix multiplication in \(n^{2.25+\epsilon}\) time  (formalized in Lean) And many many more. I had Claude put together a webpage to make it easier to explore ...

What's up on the smolweb? September 2026 roundup 2026-10-05 17:00 Autumn is here, the AI slop tide keeps rising on the big web, and the smolweb responds by growing quietly but noticeably. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in September 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,600 active capsules The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) currently lists 5,215 known capsules , with 3,567 recently connected (page upda...

WebSocket is a standard protocol to hook up a client and a server in a persistent manner. It is commonly used for live chat, notifications, multiplayer games, collaborative editing, and streaming dashboards. Many servers are written in JavaScript and use Node.js, Bun or Deno as an engine. A few years ago, I wrote a simple WebSocket benchmark in JavaScript . Two clients exchange messages through a server: client 1 sends a message to the server, the server forwards it to client 2, client 2 answ...

"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass, it still has to go perform a pass for every token in order to generate a valid response. In this example, 11 passes are required to generate the final output. (We're not accounting...

Sometimes it's easier to identify an IC with a microscope. While sorting a box of old ICs, CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled "F1-10-5", a mysterious part number that didn't show up in any databooks. Since unidentifiable ICs are useless, he gave me one to analyze. Conveniently, it was in a ceramic package, so I could open it up with a quick tap from a chisel. Under the microscope, the chip's most striking feature was a grid of square capacitors. With all those capacitors, I guessed...

I stand before Nature, looking up to a castle bathed in gold light. What are perfect places? I wonder if this is the closest I’ll find: with the air of home and the light of Day, with the breeze in the trees and history to see; with life in the moment and rhythm and movement; with gentleness bathing the Earth, winds propelling leaves into the air, painting the picture of the season. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Going on a long walk through the city has become something of a tradition for me over the last f...

Hello, Welcome to another Friday. Asteroid damage changes Bilka In 2.0, asteroids dealt damage to space platforms based on the relative speed of the asteroid and the collision would cause the asteroid to slow down. After an asteroid dealt a certain amount of damage, it would simply disappear. It was a bit strange to have the asteroids suddenly disappear into thin air with no indication of when it would happen. As you may have already experienced, version 2.1 reworks this...

The Firefox team just launched a website that allows users to rank the Interop 2027 proposals that they care about. And I care about things - for selfish reasons and for work. And that's a challenge. I want to rank things that only benefit me and my blog but I also want to rank things that would make my daily job easier. Or, at least, allow me to delete a lot of code. So I settled with a balance of five for each. My final ranking: CSS random() function CSS corner-shape property C...

On Git Refs Oct 7, 2026 I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands: $ git fetch origin master $ git switch -c my-feature origin/master Do you understand why is it origin master in one command, and origin/master in the other? I didn’t, until a few weeks ago! My understanding was that git is a content-addressable database. Git stores commits, a commit is identified by the hash of its content, and the content of a commit is, prim...